H&M is making a huge fashion comeback and they brought along the big guns for their debut.
First, as a tease, they dressed Helen Hunt in a strapless navy gown for the Academy Awards earlier this week. Now, the Swedish ‘fast-fashion’ giant will be showcasing pieces from their Fall 2013 Collection at Paris Fashion Week. This will be the first time in 8 years since the brand has hit the catwalk.
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Magali Tardy-Guyot, head of strategy at FutureBrand in Paris, explains to Bloomberg that H&M has, “matured beyond the point of saying ‘My T-shirt is the cheapest.’” They want to shift the image of their brand to be more upscale, so that they can reach the higher spending consumer.
H&M has been falling behind their Spanish competitor, Zara, whose products are overtaking H&M’s total sales and surpassing them in overall market value.
Daniel Lucht, an analyst at ResearchFarm, a London-based retail and consumer-goods forecaster, predicts that, “Fashion Week fits really well into their repositioning exercise. Someone will always come up with the cheapest T-shirt so if H&M wants to protect the position they have and regain the top position in clothing, they will have to go a bit more premium.”
H&M has already been working for over a decade on building their reputation at the forefront of fashion trends. They have collaborated with big names in fashion houses such as Lanvin, Karl Lagerfeld, and more recently, Maison Martin Margiela, in order to up their ante.
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The H&M full fashion show will be held at Musée Rodin in Paris, France, where Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior have been known to stage major runway shows.
